Data Centers in Strange Places

johannacw writes "Would you house a data center in a diamond mine or an old chapel? These organizations did, with great success; many of these facilities offer the latest in cooling and energy technology, among other advances. 'If you want an even more hardened environment for your data, you might look at the aptly named InfoBunker in Boone, Iowa, about an hour outside Des Moines. [...] The 65,000-square-foot, five-story site is dug deep into the ground. No one gets in without passing though the 4.5-ton steel door and then a three-step process. A scanner uses radio frequency to read the would-be entrant's skin as a biometric identifier. He then needs to use a keycard and enter a code on the keypad. This three-tier security is standard for high-level military installations, McGinnis explains.'"

Comments

Seems excessive

[Skewray]

Why would I want to physically access my botnet?

I always wonder.

[ender81b]

I mean, honestly, is it just me or are all these "exotic" data centers just a way to boost your CIOs ego at gatherings? Is it really necessary to have military security? Do your competitors care that much? Furthermore, would they be willing to risk criminal charges to try and steal a few thousand hard drives full of potentially useless data?

Basements with backup power, secured doors, & a good fire system in my opinion. Then again, I'm not a CIO. Once I become one though, well, I imagine MY data center will have a golf course. And blackjack. And possibly hookers.

Re:I always wonder.

[Fulcrum of Evil]

In fact, forget the datacenter!

Hmmmmm

[oborseth]

"No one gets in without passing though the 4.5-ton steel door and then a three-step process." Sounds like a lot of women I know.

..in Strange Places

[thatshortkid]

What, like the back of a Volkswagen?

Re:If I were a CIO...

[Mahjub Sa'aden]

2400-2700ms minimum latency? Check!

Don't go confusing them with technical details!

Best one I've seen

[Render_Man]

The best data center I've seen is an un-named co-lo company in Canada who has their operations on the top floor of a mall in what used to be movie theaters.

The escalators go up to the floor and promptly end at a wall. A one way mirror hides an RFID reader which 'open sesame' style activates the wall to move and let you in.

No signs, or outward indications as to it being there. Lotsa space, redundant everything and all hiding in plain sight. It was pretty cool.

Basically, yes

[Moraelin]

Basically, yes, they're there to boost some manager's ego. I haven't even heard of a recent data loss or theft that involved a team of ninjas breaking in and stealing hard drives. The ones I did hear about, offhand, involved stuff like:

- pissed off admin exports the customer database and sells it to a spammer

- a hired rent-a-coder working at home is given an export of the fucking productive database, just so he can work out the report formatting. So he asks for help in a forum and attaches a zip file of said productive database. Just so, you know, others can try their hand at formatting that data too. (And if you think that's a one-off thing, at a recent consulting job I've seen exactly that happen, with the dumbass PHB's blessing. They exported the productive database, installed it on a test machine, then let the external contractor -- not me, but the guy whose neverending mess I was supposed to help fix -- copy it all on his private laptop too. And since he was not supposed to connect an external laptop to the internal network, the PHB cheerfully supplied an USB stick to transfer the data with. Made me cringe. But, hey, he was cheaper than doing it in-house.)

- productive data, complete with customer names and personal data, is copied on some salesman's laptop, because god forbid that you inconvenience the sales guys in the least bit, even by making them log in to a web site. Plus, I'm sure he thinks he's a wizard with Excel and God knows what ad-hoc graphs and reports he might need to generate on the spot from that data. Then said laptop is forgotten on the airport or stolen. (I can remember a dozen or so instances of this in the news without even googling.)

- social engineering and/or lax security standards (As an extreme case, I've actually worked for a dot-com back in the day, who told their 1st level support to give anyone an admin account who calls in and asks for one. It's easier than just creating one for the regional managers -- although I'd debate whether those need one in the first place. Nah, just tell them to phone in and ask for one. Eventually after a year they realized that they have a few thousand admin accounts and nobody knows who those people are.)

- pwned machines on the internal network that haven't been patched since Jurassic. I remember one touching story about IIRC Slammer, where a company got hit hard because they were running with completely unpatched workstations, since apparently installing any service pack broke one of the internal applications they were using. And, of course, they'd rather save money than fix the stupid application.

- pwned machines on the internal network because some dumbass PHB or marketter figured out (or bribed an engineer for the knowledge) how to open a tunnel from inside to his home machine and leave it on, so he can access the company network from home. So when his unprotected, crapware-ladden home machine got pwned, it was connected to the intranet.

- pwned machines on the internal network because just about anyone is allowed to plug their laptop in

The last three are especially nice if everything is one big network zone.

- pwned machines because some dumbass programmer would rather argue that SQL-injection and cross-site-scripting are just hype, instead of fixing his freakin' application. I'm still suprised at the number of people who don't even know how to quote a string for use in a web page or in the database. Or better yet, to use prepared statements and/or some template/framework that handles that kind of thing for you. And, yes, I remember at least one article linked even on Slashdot where the idiot was arguing that cross-site-scripting vulnerabilities are inevitable and harmless.

- pwnage via any of the above methods (including social engineering or dishonest employees) because noone bothered setting productive database passwords more creative than the same as the app name, and/or using more than one account for a whole department. Or indeed for the whole company. It's too much work

Re:Basically, yes

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

I haven't even heard of a recent data loss or theft that involved a team of ninjas breaking in and stealing hard drives.

Ofcourse you haven't heard of it. They're ninjas. They sneak in, replace your HD by a death one and leave without you knowing it. How else would you explain HD crashes? So next time you hear the sound of a death harddrive, you'll know there is a ninja nearby...

Old bunkers often have good Cooling and Power

[billstewart]

A friend of mine bought an old missile bunker in the UK to use as a data center back during the late-90s boom. It had redundant power-grid connections, lots of cooling, and raised floors, so it cost a lot less to condition the space for data-center use than if he'd started with a basic warehouse shell like many of his competitors, and it was close enough to London for latency not to be a problem but far enough that the real-estate costs were cheaper.

U.S. geography isn't always that cooperative - most of the missile bunkers were out in not-even-flyover parts of the country like North Dakota and eastern Montana, where there was almost no telecom infrastructure nearby and it was tens of milliseconds away from SF, NYC, or even Chicago.

And Canada has their own problems - even though most of the people live within 50 miles of the US border, the Canadian government has been doing things like offering tax incentives to put call centers in remote areas to deal with unemployment - former fishing ports in Prince Edward Island, etc. - where there's not enough local telecom infrastructure to get high bandwidth connections or diverse routes. Too bad, since they've got a pool of educated people who speak good English and something that passes for French and could use the jobs.

Step right this way sir

[Sentri]

For the trifling sum of 1.5 million dollars you too can be lairing it up in style...

"The Missile Base consists of 57 acres of real estate. The center secured portion of the property is protected by the original barbed-wire-topped chainlink fence. There is a paved road leading into the property with dual entry gates.

Above ground is the original 40 X 100 shop building, two concrete targeting structures, two manufactured homes, two 8 X 8 X 40 storage containers, and the silo tops of the three missile silos, two antenna silos, one entry portal and a few other misc structures.

Below ground is a huge complex consisting of 16 buildings and thousands of feet of connecting tunnels. The major underground structures are:

Three - 160' Tall Missile Silos
Three - 4 story Equipment Terminal Buildings
Three - Fuel Terminal Buildings
Two - 6 story Antenna Silos
One Air Intake/Filtration Building
One 100' diameter Control Dome Building
One 125' diameter Power Dome Building
One - 6 story Entry Portal Building
and a few other misc buildings and areas."
- http://www.themissilebase.com/

http://cgi.ebay.com/Titan-Missile-Base-Central-Washington_W0QQcmdZViewItemQQcategoryZ1607QQihZ009QQitemZ190132455924QQrdZ1

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/10/10

If only I had the money and the crazy and the US citizenship necessary :-p